pyyaml-include is GPL3, doesn't that poison your MIT project?

[alan-copeland-keysight]

pyyaml-include is GPL3, doesn't that poison your MIT project?

[yajo]

Thanks for this investigation. I've been reading about the subject and it seems that the license violation is real. Also for jinja2-ansible-filters (see https://github.com/orgs/copier-org/discussions/1397#discussioncomment-7603817).

The FSF published https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic which states clearly that there's no difference between dynamic and static linking.

In https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2148/31465 is explained that, although this particular legal case hasn't been enforced by a trial, it's obvious what the author's intention is.

I have no desire to violate any laws, and I do have the desire to respect original authors' intentions, so we have to cure the infection.

We have 2 basic paths for the cure:

1. Use GPL3 for Copier.
2. Remove dependencies from those 2 libraries.

I'll open a poll in the forum and we'll see what our users think.

[pawamoy]

I am not a lawyer, but license contamination is, I think, only caused in case of static linking (compiling stuff to a single binary, without dynamic linking). Python uses by essence "dynamic linking", so it's not as impacted by license contamination. Copier does not provide or publish pyyaml-include's code in any way: it's users that willingly install the dependency when installing Copier.

Something like this 🤷